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7
Introduction
Social constructivism is one of the youngest ‘major’ theories in International Relations. As we will see, its main attraction as well as its main difficulty is that it tries to occupy the ‘middle ground’ in International Relations. Its proponents thus accept the influence of both structures and agency, and focus on how they influence each other. Social constructivists attempt to find a practical answer to the postmodern challenge to scientific knowledge in order to be able to conduct empirical research.
In addition, they are interested in the interplay of interests and ideas, as well as in the impact of norms, culture and institutions on international politics. Typical themes addressed by social construc-tivist work are, therefore, the construction of national interests, the spread of human rights, the impact of international organisations on state identities (and vice versa), or the development of different forms of international society.
Before we start to present and discuss the core features of social constructivism at greater length, it is worthwhile reflecting shortly on why this approach is called ‘social constructivism’.
‘Constructivism’ here means that these authors do not accept any social features of life as given.
Instead, while they acknowledge that human beings are always situated in particular contexts which inform their actions, they also reproduce, or construct, their ‘world’ through their actions. The world we live in is therefore always contextual. This is in stark contrast to neo-realism, which argues that the basic features of the international system are universal, and have been operating in history as well as at present, in the ancient Greek system of city states as much as during the Cold War. The process of construction, in turn, is a ‘social’ process – it cannot be done by one person alone, but only in the engagement with others. The term ‘constructivism’ therefore does not imply voluntarism. Individuals are always part of broader settings which they can shape, but only within the specific context.
‘Social’ also clarifies a contrast to the focus on language in postmodernism: the construction we are talking about in this chapter is one that can be observed in the many different practices of actors engaged in international politics, rather than the construction of our understanding of reality through language, which is one of the starting points of postmodernism, as we have seen in chapter 5. This does not mean that social constructivists are not interested in discourse – in fact, it is a central cat-egory which helps them to explain, for instance, foreign policy.
Social constructivism attempts to find a practical answer to the postmodern challenge to scientific knowledge in order to be able to conduct empirical research. It focuses in particular on the interplay of structure and agency, and of ideas, norms and interests.
As you will see in more detail in this chapter, social constructivists:
I analyse the interplay between structure and agency in international politics;
I are interested in the role of ideas, norms and institutions in foreign policy making;
I argue for the importance of identity and culture in international politics;
I do not deny the role of interests in policy making, but try to understand how these interests are constructed;
I accept that social science cannot operate like the natural sciences, but nonetheless insist on the possibility to theorise and empirically analyse international politics as a reality.
But we are running ahead of ourselves. To understand social constructivism, it is best first to have a closer look at how it developed in International Relations, and how it has become established as the
‘middle ground’ of the discipline.
Origins
During the second half of the 1980s International Relations as a discipline was dominated by what is sometimes called the ‘third’, sometimes the ‘fourth’ debate. This debate is covered in more detail in the concluding chapter. The numbering was not invented to confuse students, although confusing it is. There is no dispute about the first two debates that shaped the study of international politics, although these, too, neglect a lot of other work going on at the time. The first one was between realism and idealism. It essentially asked ontological questions – questions about the nature of inter-national politics, and, indeed, the nature of human beings, such as whether humans are inherently bad and peace therefore difficult to achieve.
The second debate was between behaviouralists and traditionalists. This one was about method-ology: the behaviouralists, mostly from American universities, wanted to turn IR into a ‘proper’
science, and focus on the formulation of universally valid theories that explain outcomes in inter-national politics on the basis of causal relationships between observable behaviour (thus the name).
Traditionalists, in contrast, argued that international politics cannot be studied like the natural sci-ences. In particular, they cast doubt on the possibility of formulating universally valid theories in IR.
Instead, they suggested that the traditional (philosophical) methods of historians in particular were more adequate to understand international politics.
Hedley Bull was one of the outspoken representatives of traditionalists in the 1960s and 1970s and, although Australian, he is seen as one of the core figures of the so-called ‘English School’ of IR, on which more in the ‘Themes’ section of this chapter. To this date, the approach taken in many uni-versities in Britain towards the analysis of international politics and the teaching of IR is sceptical of the possibilities of a ‘science’ of IR, and there is an emphasis on the contextual understanding of history, or the role of factors not readily observable, such as norms and ideas, or the pursuit of critical and normative theory rather than universally valid explanations.
In the 1980s both realism and liberalism (idealism) were revamped – you should be familiar with the debate between neo-realism and neo-liberalism from previous chapters. You should also have noticed that the so-called ‘neo-neo-debate’ between these two theories was a rather narrow one. It centred on questions such as whether states are pursuing absolute or relative gains, or whether power was predominantly military or economic. Both theories had accepted the central status of states as actors in international politics, the presumption of states as rational actors, and the focus on the inter-national system rather than, for instance, domestic actors.
Indeed, the terms of the debate were so narrow that Yosef Lapid, in a famous article about the
future of IR published in 1989, did not see it as one of the great debates of the discipline, and focused instead on the neo-neo-camp, or rationalism, and the various approaches that had started to criticise rationalism and to look for alternative ways to think about international politics. These included, for instance, feminism and postmodernism, which are covered in other chapters of this book. Their attack on rationalism operated on many levels: ontologically, they disputed the unquestioned status of states and the assumption of rationality; and methodologically, they sided with the English School and the traditionalists, and rejected the notion of science, which both neo-realism and neo-liberalism built upon. Indeed, many reflectivists went a step further and turned the methodological question into an epistemological one, which means that they started to reflect on the basis on which we can have knowledge about the world at all. The traditionalists might not have liked science, but they still thought it possible to approximate objective knowledge. Reflectivists disputed this, and consequently focused their research on the production of knowledge in IR and the consequences of constructing international politics in particular terms for the practice of international politics.
Ole Wæver, for one, counts the neo-neo-debate as the third debate, and therefore sees the debate between rationalists and reflectivists as the fourth one. He also argues that at the extremes of the fourth debate there was little to gain for the future development of IR. On the rationalist side, there was boredom: not much to discuss here. On the reflectivist side, there was the danger of nihilism:
how can we say anything meaningful if all we say is a reflection of the particular discursive circum-stances of our statement? Wæver’s own answer was to adopt what initially looks like a paradoxical position, trying to combine elements of postmodernism and realism. This is not quite the path taken by social constructivists, but in their basic analysis, they agree with Wæver and his view of the fourth debate.
Between the two radical poles, social constructivists see themselves as occupying the middle ground. In an influential article, published in 1997 by the European Journal of International Relations, Emanuel Adler identified social constructivism as occupying the space between the indi-vidualist account of rationalism, which starts from the individual subject, and the holism of structuralism, which focuses on all-encompassing accounts of world politics; between the agency-oriented explanations of rationalism and the focus on structure in structuralism; and between the materialism integral to rationalism and the ideationalism in cognitive approaches (and, in Adler’s, however mistaken, view, in many reflectivist works). In addition, social constructivism was to provide the via media by accepting some of the ontological insights of reflectivism, as well as respecting the epistemological concerns, but without giving up the aim to understand, and possibly even to explain, concrete outcomes of international politics.
Social constructivism should be viewed more as an approach to IR than a fixed perspective. In this section, we set out how some of the work produced thus far speaks to some of the themes identified in other chapters in this book.